Hackintosh make something possible that Apple does not: already support the latest Alder Lake processors from Intel

With the transition of Macs from Intel to Apple Silicon it was thought that the history of hackintosh would quickly come to an end. However, the bootloader development team OpenCore has managed to add support for 12th generation Intel processors (Alder Lake).

This is a major technical achievement, primarily for the community that wants to use the latest hardware in their hackintosh. This is because Alder Lake chips will never make it to Mac computers genuine and consequently unsupported in any way on macOS.

Hackintosh with the newest CPUs

In Engadget we have talked a lot about what a hackintosh is and what is needed to mount one, but in short, the general rule says that for the system to work, PC hardware should be as close to a Mac as possibleThe most important being the CPU, the GPU and the chipset.

But even with the most identical hardware possible, we couldn’t install macOS on a non-Mac computer. This is where OpenCore comes into play. Without going into technical details, it is about a bootloader that is capable of “spoofing” hardware facing Apple’s operating system so that it can run on a PC.

OpenCore is currently one of the most active projects. Its developer community is constantly working to bridge the gap between genuine Mac hardware and PCs. Product of that work added support to the 12th generation Intel chips and the Z690 chipset.

However, the compatibility will come with some limitations. The system you will not be able to take advantage of the capabilities of the Alder Lake efficiency cores and neither is Thread Director optimization technology, so users could experience a drop in performance.

On the other hand, it will not be possible to take advantage of the integrated graphics of the 12th generation chips, so a dedicated GPU must be used to have a video signal. This is one of the consequences of the lack of compatibility of these chips with genuine Macs.

Although, as mentioned at the beginning, this is a major technical achievement, OpenCore’s ability to run macOS on x86 systems will obviously get more complicated over time. With their commitment to Apple Silicon, it is very likely that in the future, the Cupertino operating system will only be able to run on hardware validated by themselves.

Images | Micael Faccio (Flickr) | Intel